


here we are, just about the same

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluffy, M/M, Roadtrip, Vignettes, linear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-16
Updated: 2015-02-16
Packaged: 2018-03-13 08:40:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3375023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seventy years after crashing a plane, Bucky wakes up first.</p><p>Steve wakes up a few minutes after him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here we are, just about the same

**Author's Note:**

  * For [radialarch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/gifts), [augustbird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/augustbird/gifts).



> The challenge was set: write a fic where no one dies. This is what was born.
> 
> (Please note: I find this fic _weird as hell_ , I mean it.) Written for all those people on twitter who have basically single-handedly made me write more fic; man, are they probably _really_ sorry about that now.

It’s quiet and it’s warm, and dark, and it smells faintly like cleaner and cotton sheeting, hospital smells. But when Bucky opens his eyes it doesn’t look like a hospital, and he’s so exhausted that he can’t help but close his eyes again for a minute before he gets up, sleepily, and drags himself to the other twin bed.

Steve is huge and comfortable and he makes it even warmer as he moves, still half asleep, so that Bucky can accommodate himself. Neither of them are small men, but they fit together like a puzzle, legs and arms slotting in familiar ways, ways that feel like home. Steve barely wakes, and mutters, “Where are we?” under his breath as he moves his arms, and Bucky tucks himself against Steve and shakes his head. “Buck?”

“Who else?” Bucky asks, and goes back to sleep.

That’s how Nick Fury finds them, six hours later.

~~~~

Steve is furious when they wake up - he starts a really bad morning by breaking through a wall and, with Bucky under one arm, tries to take off into a strange new world. Bucky doesn’t appreciate the particulars of being hauled like a sack of flour through what looks like something out of a pulp novel or a comic book, so they’re about twenty feet into some place that looks like Times Square took a few pages out of Stark’s favorite fever dream when Bucky finally elbows Steve in the side. “Are you kidding me?”

Steve drops him, then, and Bucky slams into the ground on his side. “Bucky, no, so-” Steve starts, when they’re surrounded by what can only be described as _agents_. Steve recognizes it, like shadows of Peggy Carter’s stance and attitude in men and women who know better than to pull a gun out in a crowded street. Bucky flips onto his ass, pulls himself up, and stares.

Steve stares.

There’s a lot of staring.

The staring only intensifies as a man steps through the crowd of agents; his skin is dark and he’s very pointedly wearing an eyepatch, and he looks like he’s in charge. “You’ve been asleep for a long time, boys,” he says, “there’s a lot you’ve missed.”

Steve opens his mouth, but it’s Bucky’s voice that cuts first, which isn’t surprising; Bucky’s always been just a minute faster than Steve, always been just a second ahead of the curve. Once, it used to make Steve feel slow and stupid, until Dum Dum Dugan, of _all_ people, made a comment about how they were the two fastest thinking bastards he had ever met. “Anyone ever tell you that it’s rude to watch a man sleep,” Bucky snaps, “and ruder to leave a man in his underwear while you watch him sleep?”

“Sleep seemed like the best thing for you,” the man says, his voice booming, but somehow not going past the two of them. Steve is distracted; he keeps moving his head to see the lights and the strange scrolling marquees, and he can hear someone (a tourist, his brain provides automatically) whisper, _is this promotion for a Broadway show?_

Steve looks down and maybe he suddenly is conscious that he’s only in an undershirt and a pair of trousers he doesn’t remember wearing. “Doesn’t change what Bucky said,” he mutters, feeling odd about it. He feels like he’s trying to fit himself back into his skin.

He also feels an old stubbornness rising in his gut, one that says that determines, right there, that if they make a deal about the fact that they woke them up curled around each other, Steve’s not saying a word. It’s none of their business, and it’s less of their business because they _violated_ their space, even if the space isn’t really theirs. Even if Steve doesn’t know exactly where he is or what’s happening.

“How long do you mean,” Steve finally manages, scowling. He can’t look over at Bucky right now. He can’t check him over, there’s no time, “when you say we’ve been asleep a long time?”

“We should do this inside,” the man says, and that’s when Bucky makes a noise, and Steve hears the signal, and they move, fast, breaking through the ranks of agents. It turns out that changing the face of a city is easier than changing the bones of it. Steve and Bucky may be boys from Brooklyn at the very heart of them, but they know enough about Manhattan to know how to disappear. 

It takes them three minutes to lose the agents in the throng of tourists and commuters, workers and crowds. Bucky turns and looks at Steve, something halfway between terror and excitement in his face as he grabs his wrist and says, “Don’t lose me, don’t _lose_ me.”

“The library,” Steve says, and Bucky nods in agreement, and it’s something familiar in a way that is disorienting; they’ve done this before, during the war, regrouping to figure out how to approach the next problem, the next fight, but Steve’s never run from anything in New York, not in this body, not looking the way he does now. It feels strange, to be familiar, to be comfortable, and at the same time, to do something completely strange.

He feels like maybe he should be running towards his problem, not away from it.

When they finally stop, in the back of the New York City Library, looking worse for wear and not wearing shoes, and getting weird looks from the librarians, he says as much to Bucky. “Nothing you’re saying surprises me, buddy,” Bucky says in his most unimpressed tone of voice. “You always did have a thick skull, it’s the only thing that kept anyone from beating your brains in.” 

“Jerk,” Steve mutters, but there’s no heat in it. “What’s going on?”

Bucky shrugs and makes a motion for Steve to sit still. “Just stay here,” he says, and he disappears around the stacks, and comes back a minute later; he looks pale, he looks almost like he’s been shaking. 

In his hand is a newspaper.

“Buddy,” he says, “ _Steve_ ,” he adds, as if he’s in some strange state of shock, like he has to make sure that Steve knows exactly who he’s talking to, “It’s 2012.”

~~~~~

It had been cold; that’s what Bucky remembers. When he thinks really strongly about it, he doesn’t like to focus on the small details; the shape of the cube in Schmidt’s hand, the way Steve’s hands wrapped around the steering column, the crackle of Peggy’s voice, the way that when the plane crashed Steve had wrapped himself around Bucky, just like they did when they slept, when they knew the door was locked and that no one would be trying to come in and interrupt them. 

“I’m glad it was with you,” Steve had said, pulling Bucky close, his teeth chattering. Bucky couldn’t feel his ears or his toes or his fingers, but he could feel Steve’s hands around his head. “I’m glad it was with you,” Steve had repeated, but Bucky was too cold to be able to reply, so he just pressed his face into Steve’s chest and let the thudding lull him to sleep.

“I’m glad you’re here,” is what Steve says now, when he hauls himself home from the kind of day that he used to dream about back when he was sick. It’s a strange thing, that Steve _likes_ being able to work until he’s exhausted, when the rest of the world would rather live off the ridiculous amounts of money he has. Between the backpay and the royalties from the movies he made in the forties, and money from merchandising and comics and war bonds that Steve had patriotically purchased during the war, he didn’t have to do it.

Bucky didn’t have to do it either, but just as often he’s hauling himself home too. “You could just go work for S.H.I.E.L.D, they’ll probably work you less than NYU,” he says, stripping his shirt off. They have a one-bedroom in Red Hook in a building that belongs to Howard Stark, who sputters around in a wheelchair that his harried son is forever trying to get to fly for more than two minutes. They don’t know how much other people in the building pay for rent, because Howard refuses to charge them, and no one is brave enough to tell them. Between him and Peggy, he’s the one with the sharp mind, and every time he talks Bucky dislikes him more and more, which Tony thinks is the funniest thing in the world. 

Whenever Steve complains of this arrangement, Bucky always points out that it’s not like they ever asked them about this sort of thing. Howard just showed up, a week after they told S.H.I.E.L.D thanks but no thanks, they weren’t interested in serving again, after the Chitauri and the emergency need for Captain America, making shrieking noises about how he didn’t need to hear that they had been found from his useless son, thank you very much. How a man near 100 can still make those noises, Bucky doesn’t know.

Bucky knows that Howard doesn’t like him very much, too, but they work that way.

“Can you turn the radio on?” Steve asks, and Bucky gives him a look, because he’s still upright, looking offensively hale and healthy and whole, and he hasn’t even taken the straps for his backpack that make his shoulders look as wide as the Mississippi off, while Bucky is in an undershirt and his pants, his own books and materials lying in scattered, concentric circles around him in smaller concentrations right up to the couch, where Bucky is lying facedown in a pile of study materials and books by Howard Zinn. “Please?” Steve adds, with an equally offensive smile.

“Christ almighty, you are a _chore_ ,” Bucky says, reaching forward. They have the radio almost permanently tuned to music that they grew up with, to wartime classics and even some stuff that they never heard before because it came a few years later; they listen to it when they’re just home, when they’re just trying to exit the bubble of technology and modernity and things like Fifty Shades of Some Book That Bucky’s Classmates Think Is Funny to Make Him Listen To. Modern music is for mornings and dancing; this stuff is so that they can close their eyes and think of something that isn’t work and school for a few minutes.

Steve rewards Bucky with a kiss to the shoulder, and then his considerable weight is dipping the couch cushions next to Bucky as he kisses again, upwards, under his ear, at the corner of his mouth. “Still a chore?” he asks.

“The worst chore,” Bucky replies, and turns, and kisses him long and slow and dirty, and it’s like the radio agrees with the actions because suddenly _I've Got my Love to Keep me Warm_ starts playing, and Steve makes a hopeless noise against Bucky’s mouth, and Bucky knows that what he’s thinking of is that hot summer when they first lived alone and Steve finally kissed Bucky on the mouth, and to drown out the noise of sex they turned the radio up, and this was the song that played when they wound down enough to breathe.

Every time Steve hears it, he gets hard enough to hammer nails, and Bucky’s just glad that no one who they work with has ever figured it out.

~~~~

“Don’t you think it’s your duty to serve the American people?” the interviewer asks, and Bucky dips his head onto the table with a groan. Steve feels a certain moral _fury_ rising in his stomach, but he hopes it doesn’t show on his face. This is the first interview they’ve agreed to in almost two years, because it’s the first interview that didn’t ignore Bucky, that asked him, point-blank, to be part of this.

“Lady, you are walking a thin line,” Bucky says, rubbing his face with his hands.

“I think that I served my time, and there isn’t a war,” Steve says, and he can hear the solidness in his voice, “and that if the Avengers need us, we’ll talk about coming back then,” he adds.

The interviewer doesn’t seem frazzled, though. She just smiles a bit. “Don’t you think you owe it to your country, considering your status as-”

Bucky’s groan gets louder, but Steve interrupts her. “What I owe to my country is my loyalty, which it has, but let’s talk about what our country owes to veterans - we put our lives out there on the line, and they come back with shell-sho-I mean, with post-traumatic stress disorder, with their heads screwed on too tight, and they’re told to go and integrate themselves into the world like it’s just that easy. Bucky and I had it better, because we had money and I had fame and prestige, and because we had friends in powerful places, but I’ve seen the things this country does, I see it every day on the streets, and if I’m going to serve my country, it will be there.” He pauses for a breath, and he can see Bucky’s lips twitching in an effort not to smile. “I’m not the kind of man who became a soldier because I wanted the glory. I wanted to do what’s right. And that’s not right anymore. I owe more to this country, and frankly, I owe more to Bucky.”

There’s a moment there, another pause, and the interviewer moves in like a shark. “Are you lovers?”

The room goes very quiet, and Bucky looks over at Steve, just his eyes, his hand covering his mouth. They’ve talked about this, about being honest about it - it’s not a crime anymore, they see people in their neighborhood - ladies holding hands and pressing kisses to each others mouths on the street, young men dressed to the nines to go to the theater, their fingers intertwined. 

But it was always something private, the last bastion of something _theirs_ , and to a degree, Steve didn’t want anyone to think it meant he was faking it with Peggy, making it up, because he wasn’t. He loved her - he loves her still, he goes to see her once a week even though it means traveling on the train for hours each Wednesday, during the only day that class and work let up a bit for him, and he holds her hands and they talk about the old days, and sure, she forgets a lot, but each time he says goodbye and presses a soft kiss to her forehead, she smiles and tells him she’s so glad, so glad he didn’t forget her.

He would have married her, really, and it wouldn’t have meant he loved Bucky any less for it, or that he loves him any less now. It was different. It’s hard for Steve to articulate, but Bucky gets it, because Bucky knows the inside of Steve’s head just as well as Steve knows the backstreets of Brooklyn, still.

He takes a breath, draws himself up to his full sitting height. “I’m going to say this, once, and I’m going to be as clear as possible. I’m not ashamed of who and what Bucky is to me, but it’s private. _That said_ ,” he emphasizes, right when he thinks she’s going to cut him off again, “if you asked me that because you thought it would shock or offend me, let me tell you, we had homosexuals in the forties, too, and frankly and honestly I’m _glad_ that this sort of thing was decriminalized, and I think it’s a pretty sad state of affairs when in the United States people are still unable to get equal ri-”

“Okay, okay, let’s just-” Bucky starts, but he’s laughing, he can’t stop laughing, and Steve knows why, because what Bucky sees is that small guy standing up against whatever Goliath he came across that week, because he sees fight after fight he dragged Steve out of, because this is just who Steve is.

This is who Steve will always be.

Which is, of course, why the interviewer gets another two minutes of a blistering earful before Bucky manages to ease him off, like a dog with a leash. “Stevie,” he says, and Steve moves before he thinks about it.

There are things they can’t quite get out of the habit of, even now. They barely watch television, outside the Food Network, because Steve finds most television unbearable and Bucky prefers going to the movies, anyway. They go dancing once a week, at least, because once Bucky got the flavor of modern dancing down, he found he still liked it, and Steve still sits in the sidelines and nurses a drink, and watches him, like it’s still 1938 and they still have to hide that Steve is crazy for Bucky, that he’d pay anything to be whatever girl Bucky is swinging around the room.

The worst habit, though, is that when Bucky gets really annoyed with Steve, or when he’s especially pleased with himself (because there’s no middle ground), Bucky calls him _Stevie_.

Steve _hates_ it.

That stupid nickname has the power to dismantle all of Bucky’s sexual charms, it has the ability to douse over Steve’s spine like cold water. He’s been punching Bucky for years over that dumb nickname, right in the shoulder, but Bucky’s quick enough to use it as a weapon.

The interviewer sees this, and she blanches and suggests cutting the interview short, and when she leaves Steve punches Bucky in the arm _again_ , because _jerk_.

They’re on the train home and Bucky is laughing still, and finally Steve can’t help but laugh with him, because it’s contagious, his smile, it always was. He surprises them both, though, when he catches Bucky’s mouth in a kiss, right there on the train; he can see the shock on Bucky’s face when they move apart, the sudden tight fear for just an instant. Steve catches his hand, and shakes his head, and makes the kind of shushing noises that his mother would make to him when he had a nightmare. “I’m not ashamed of you.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything back, but the silence as they ride back, it’s only broken by Bucky’s fingers lacing in Steve’s, and the twitching of Bucky’s mouth, upwards.

~~~~

In April, the Helicarrier fiasco happens and Hydra’s involvement is leaked, and Steve, it hits him hard. Bucky’s dealing with his own problems: sometimes he still wakes with Zola’s voice in his head, feeling strapped down. Steve can’t hold his wrists for too long, because Bucky starts to panic, he can’t breathe, he thinks _this is asthma, this is God’s punishment to me, this is justice_ , and doctor’s appointments are worse than traffic, the train during commute, and dealing with his once-a-month, painstaking interviews with S.H.I.E.L.D combined. 

So they finish the term, and Steve quits his job, and they drive across the country.

The roads are new and shiny in ways that Bucky doesn’t remember from back in the day, or even from things like movies: they watched _It Happened One Night_ because it was in the collection of DVDs that Bucky found at the supermarket for a dollar - which was almost fifty-five cents more than they paid when they went to see it, together, in 1934 - and Bucky remembers that America, he remembers those roads.

It’s a new world, and he doesn’t mind it at all. He loves the speed they get in the beat up old car that they bought, third hand, a white Buick with a lot of miles but a sturdy old thing. He loves, too, the rest stops and the open country, he likes griping at each stop, he loves hating Ohio and Oklahoma and he loves how much Steve has to gasp and stop when they drive over Missouri, over ranges of mountain and forest that he didn’t know was tucked away there.

They drive down into Arizona and they sit on the northern rim of the Grand Canyon for hours, because Steve is mesmerized by the colors and Bucky is just impressed by the scope of it, and they drive up to Las Vegas and spend exactly three hours on the strip before Steve gets annoyed. “It’s like Times Square on the serum, only apparently, Las Vegas wasn’t a good man,” he says with a sharp shake of his head. They drive up, then, into Wyoming and Montana, and Bucky thinks they’ve slogged through too much wildness to appreciate all that landscape.

They stop in Idaho and check into a cheap motel, and Bucky fucks Steve into the mattress fast, then slow, then slower, and they huddle against each other and keep the cold out like they were back in Europe in 1944, curled around each other, only this time without dirty fatigues and body armor between them. “Do you regret not going back,” Steve asks, and Bucky knows he means, because Bucky can see each thought as it parades in the back of Steve’s eyes, he can read him like he’s a book and it’s broad bright daylight.

Bucky presses his nose against Steve’s shoulder and feels enormous; he always does, when Steve talks like this, because it’s so rare that Steve tries to make himself smaller. After years of having to be bigger than his skin, now that Steve fits, sometimes it still makes Bucky feel enormous. “I don’t have anything to prove.”

“Our job was to defeat Hydra,” Steve argues, “and they’re still out there.”

“Our job was to win a war, and we thought we were going to die for it,” Bucky says, looking up at him. “You can’t keep chasing these fights, not if you’re doing it to prove a point.”

There’s quiet for a minute, but god, Steve’s thinking is so loud it fills the entire room, occupies the crevasses of dark and solitude. It’s so loud it could fill the entire Grand Canyon and still pour out the sides. “Spit it out, Rogers, you’re giving me a headache.”

“I think I should go back,” Steve says, and Bucky sighs, rolls a bit. “I mean it!”

“I know you do,” Bucky replies, finding a pillow. “Sometimes I think that if I hadn’t gotten on that plane with you, if you had been alone, you’da gone back the second they asked you, way back when you woke up.” 

Steve makes a noise, almost like a laugh. “That’s not really fair.”

Bucky sits up and Steve is looking away, so he tugs him, so they can look each other in the eye. “Rogers, you are so unbelievably predictable. Without me, and with Peggy being the way she is, you’d toss yourself into every single stupid, dangerous, and reckless situation you could find.” He pushes him away a bit. “Even when you were a kid, it’s like being sick wasn’t enough for you. Dying was the only thing that would fit the bill.”

“Bucky-” Steve starts.

“You are a _chore_ , but if you’re going back, don’t think for a second you’re doing it without me.”

Then there really is silence. “You did your time,” Steve says, quietly, like a plea. He knows, too. How much Bucky wasn’t made for it. He was good at it, God, was he ever, but he wasn’t _made_ to fight. It was just something he was good at. That’s all.

“Someone has to watch your sorry backside,” Bucky says. “And I don’t trust anyone else to be able to really chase you down when you’re doing something _really_ dumb.”

“I only do dumb things when I think I’ll lose you,” Steve says, and that’s it, that’s the end of the fight. 

The next day, they begin the drive back to Brooklyn.

~~~~~

They settle on the roof of their building; one of their neighbors has a garden up there that she keeps pretty and decorated, and it’s all really unmanly but Steve likes it, he likes it in the spring when the bumblebees from a nearby urban farm amble by, stuffed with pollen and fuzzy, and he likes it now, when Bucky is leaning back, splay-legged, on a white and pink painted chair, a beer in hand. 

“If you hadn’t been with me,” Steve says, “I think I’d be a mess.”

Bucky just looks over. “But I was with you. You think I’m going to let you go so easy? I think you owe me seventy-two cents from back in 1924 that I still haven’t gotten back yet.”

Steve snorts - Bucky goes on about those seventy-two cents whenever he thinks that Steve’s getting sappy. It’s a way to put him in his place. 

Steve reaches into his pocket and pulls out three quarters. “Three cents interest,” he says, trying and failing at smiling. 

Bucky looks him over and shakes his head. “Nah, Rogers,” he says, taking a swig of his beer, “I don’t know what I’d do with ‘em, or without you.”

“Now who’s sappy,” Steve laughs, and Bucky chucks an empty seed packet that’s lying in reach at his head. “Jerk,” Steve tells him, and moves his chair closer.

“Takes one to know one,” Bucky replies, takes a sip of his beer, and moves just enough to be able to hold hands, but they don’t.

The space between them is mostly imaginary, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the song _Two Sleepy People_ , of which Julie London's version is my favorite.


End file.
